5 Challenges to Developing Scalable, Flexible Data Center Networking

Overview: Today's enterprises are expanding geographically through growth and acquisitions at an unprecedented rate. They're also must address increasingly stringent government regulations. To meet these challenges, enterprises are relying more on any-to-any connectivity among sites and users - connectivity among large data centers. Such data center networks extend local area network (LAN) and storage fabric (SAN and NAS) among geographically dispersed enterprise locations, from headquarters to data centers to individual branches.

To accomplish this extension of LAN and storage fabric, data center networks need to consider the following in their strategy:

Consolidating business information into connected data centers can reduce costs, enhance security, and simplify management. It can also enable the necessary infrastructure for addressing government regulations.

To provide optimal benefit, the data center network should be private, stable and resilient. It should be able to grow with your business and provide a migration path to future technologies; and it should also adapt quickly to changing business requirements. The storage or replication network should also be fast and simple, avoiding as much of the OSI stack as an enterprise's application will reduce latency.